As millions of high school and college students graduate across the country this month and last, it's important to stop and ask if enough is being done in education to help revive the economy and put more Americans to work.
Everyone understands that the key to a brighter future for all Americans is more and better jobs. It's the great pathway to prosperity and we'll only get there by way of more and better education -- at all levels.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to improve education -- or anything else -- without good data. Right now, that information frequently isn't available. In fact, the data gaps are huge. Consider the startling facts:
The fact is that educators, policymakers, parents and students don't have the facts. They lack data needed to understand links between educational experiences and outcomes. Trying to ascertain connections between credentials and employability is a high-stakes game of blind man's bluff.
We must do better and better data holds the promise to improve the system in three important ways. Reliable information creates greater transparency and accountability, enabling predictive analysis and continuous improvement. Second, data provides benchmarks for allocating dwindling education resources. Third, a data-rich environment empowers individuals to make informed decisions about education options.
From Main Street to Wall Street, information creates the transparency required in all functioning markets, including educational futures. Good data and the means to properly analyze and access it will increase our return on investment in K-12 and post-secondary education. Investing without the benefit of reliable data is gambling.
Data can be a game changer. And when it comes to education, we must change the game. There's no other way to restart our sputtering economy and prepare our citizens for the jobs of the 21st Century.
Health care provides a good analogy. The system is undergoing a massive transition from paper to electronic medical records, in part because research showed that lack of data contributed to as many as 200,000 unnecessary deaths every year. By contrast, the Framingham Heart Study has used longitudinal data to revolutionize our understanding of the causal links connecting diet and exercise to heart disease.
Lacking data, opinion prevails. School districts "pay about $8 billion each year to teachers [with] master's degrees, even though there is little evidence [that they] improve student achievement more than other teachers," noted Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a recent speech.
The lack of evidence is all around us. The Washington Post cited a recent report from the Council of the Great City Schools that says "black male students trail their white counterparts in school by alarming margins and for reasons that often are not well understood."
Educators needn't continue to grope for answers. The Dallas Morning News has reported on lawmakers in Texas who are using data to grapple with record budget shortfalls by identifying schools whose students perform better than expected, even where funding is severely limited. Armed with data, educators in Texas have "a chance to figure out which districts might be doing a better job in an area and find out how they do it," the paper reported.
The dearth of data isn't just a problem for educators and policymakers. Students and their parents also lack comparative data about education options and outcomes. A car buyer can go to the Web and easily compare the features, options and performance ratings of various vehicles. But finding solid data on the employment prospects of someone who spends more than $200,000 to earn a bachelor's degree? Good luck.
The good news is that we have made strides toward collecting the right information, linking it across time and providing key feedback as students move from K-12 to higher education and into the workforce. Most states have at least begun to set up information systems that can aggregate and display education data (while protecting the privacy of individuals) and connect the dots that inform policy and decision-making.
Some states have made more progress. Colorado is using data and a common measure to gauge students' progress over time and to inform a state-wide education reform plan. In Louisiana, the state's Dropout Early Warning Data System (DEWS) identifies at-risk students and provides interventions for re-engaging them. Moreover, the system assesses the effectiveness of those interventions.
Yet we are only halfway there -- and that's a dangerous place to be in an environment where every dollar counts. We must finish the job.
High-quality, actionable education data is in everyone's interest, and we all need to work together to assure its availability and use. In particular, we urge governors and legislators to demand that we get the right data to the right people at the right time to address tough questions about educational access, learning, success, and employability. We can't afford not to.
Follow Jamie Merisotis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jamieindy
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I think that regardless of the extent of the problems in the American education system, the same fixes are going to be applicable. We need better funding for inner city schools. We need to stop firing good teachers just because they were the last one's hired. And honestly, I think it would be a good move to shift more classes online in order to save money. You look at companies like Pearson (http://www.Pearson.com), Cengage (4ltrpress.cengage.com) and AES (http://www.aeseducation.com) and you see that they're not just making books. They're selling curriculum and online tools which would save the education system a lot of money.
Aside from improved education data transparency and consistency, government and foundation money flows to education programs needs to be as transparent as possible too, so donors can help each other and the public understand how they are supporting education, sharing their experiences to help each other make more informed decisions. The Foundation Center (http://foundationcenter.org), through its eGrant Reporting works directly with many foundation and through grant management software companies to collect and curate foundation grant data for review and research. Additionally through its Grantsfire program (http://maps.foundationcenter.org/rss/grantsfire) on the Center’s website highlighting foundation transparency: Glasspockets (http://glasspockets.org) foundations can share their most recently announced grants and tell their stories about how they’re impacting the world.
Greater availability of quality grant data allows for the development of targeted research reports and creation donor collaboration sites such as Foundations for Education Excellence (http://foundationcenter.org/educationexcellence/). Working directly in partnership with foundations and other donor organizations, the Foundation Center is able to help improve the availability of quality data on funding for education and help donors make smarter decisions.
To be sure, informed decision making is important. No Child Left Behind was a misinformed decision. It was a mistake we would never be able to estimate in monetary terms. Let us use a peer review methodology to obtain more relevant assessment data. Lets look at actual student projects and portfolios and have teachers, administrators and parent representatives review it and grade it based upon standards. We can bubble the evaluations and feed it into data bases if have to. This is what scientist do to evaluate their progress and it is a more democratic, albeit admittedly an imperfect method. To come back to the Karl Popper quote about learning from our mistakes and not from the accumulation of data, I would say to you that a statistician drowned in a river which had an average depth of 10 Inches. Our kids are drowning in tests which measure the wrong aspects of their capacity as young human beings. It does not measure originality, rather, it measures the ability to understand and conform to standardized thought patterns. Conformity is not what we want because it blunts the natural creativity and entrepreneurial attitudes most of us agree we want to inspire.
While data is important, it is not everything. Spending money on useless data is worse than not having that data at all. It is also important how that data is interpreted and then used. Too many decision makers view data with numerical certainty that doesn't exist to those who truly understand what the data says. There are issues of privacy and data security as well. And then the big gorilla that no one mentions ... cost. Sure, it costs to not have data. But, data does not come for free. What happens if the analysis shows that the cost of collecting and using that data is more than it is worth? Are you willing to sacrifice additional teachers and support staff to collect data? These are all questions that no one seems to answers when they simply talk about the need for data. It is a nice platitude, but implementation is not simple. Even more shocking is that some very good measurement systems are not in-line with political and legal mandates. What do you do when laws and politics keep you from collecting good data?
So many of our problems these days are a result of decisions made by accountants rather than people who actually work and produce. Customer service at my husband's company has deteriorated in the last few decades because the accountants have determined it isn't cost effective. Collecting data and and creating a numbers analysis will do the same thing to education.